This is going to be an ongoing series of posts (I’m starting to get a lot of those already, aren’t I?) with random tidbits I’ve picked up during my wanderings across the interwebs. Today I’ve got two things for you:

The first is one most people know, for switching between programs on your computer. Instead of going down to the menu and clicking on whichever program you want (among the ones you have open) hold down the “Alt” key and hit the “Tab” key. This allows you to quickly switch back and forth. If you have more than 2 windows open, you can keep hitting “Tab” to rotate between them. To move in the opposite direction, hold down “Shift” in addition to “Alt.” When you find the window you want, let go of “Alt” (and “Shift”).

The second is something I picked up at Lifehacker.com and is for those of you that are tired of having to remember (but eventually forgetting) passwords to stuff you sign up for. Instead of writing your passwords down, or using the same password for everything (dangerous, because if someone finds out that password they can get into all of your accounts) you can do this. First, come up with a 4 or 5 digit code (best if it’s letters and numbers, but it can be all letters or all numbers if you want), I’ll use “12345” for this example. Now, you alternate the digits of that code with the first 4 or 5 letters out the name of the website you’re on in order to come up with your password. For example, your password for myspace would be 1m2y3s4p5a. Your password for gmail would be 1g2m3a4i5l, etc. You can do the first five letters of the website, the last five, the middle five, it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re consistent. Then, instead of remembering all those passwords, you only need to remember your code and the fact that you use the first 5 letters in the website’s name. Much easier, and your password for every website is still different, so if one is compromised you don’t have to worry about changing the rest. It’s also usually a much better password than what most people choose, which is a name, regular word, or birthday. You can still use the name, just now use it as your code.
A couple of caveats with doing things this way:

1. Yes, at first it will definitely take you a few seconds longer to type in your passwords, because you’ll have to pause for a sec and think about it. But, that goes away once you get used to your code. And it’s worth it, not having to worry about your bank account just because someone managed to get into your myspace account

2. If someone gets your passwords to at least 2 different sites, they can easily figure out your code and get into the rest (it’s still better for you than if you use the same password everywhere though, then they only need one site).

3. Obviously, you still have to remember your code, but you’re smart, I think you can manage that

That website has a lot of different tricks like that to simplify things, most with a technological bent. Check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.

I’ve always been the “technology guy” around my family and, to a much lesser extent, my friends as well. Like when it comes to almost anything that has wires and needs electricity, I’ve always been the person that was able to just fire it up and figure out how to use it. Nowadays, my affinity for technology manifests itself whenever somebody mentions a problem they are having, or an interest they have in something.

I’m usually the guy that says, “Oh word, you should check out [insert random website that relates to what they were talking about].” The problem is, people seldom listen anymore (if they ever did). It’s actually starting to get a little dispiriting. I’m not quite sure whether it’s because I’m always talking about some new website, so after a while people start to tune out, or if they just don’t feel like being bothered trying something new.

I fully understand that I have a much lower threshold for finding out about and signing up for these web services, so I mostly understand where my peoples are coming from. For me to sign up for something new, it only needs to have the potential of helping me do something easier in the near future (maybe a year or two – I’d like to know how to use it well by the time I need it). I think most other people will not bother signing up for something unless a few important conditions are met:

1. They have some immediate problem, and the website/service/whatever will solve that problem.

2. It is clear that the amount of time spent learning how to use the new thing well enough for it to replace whatever the old thing they were using will be more than made up by the time they will save by using the new thing.

3. It will not cause a major disruption to their routine in many other aspects of their life.

The last two factors may end up being more important or less important, depending on the severity of the problem, but that seems to basically be the formula.

There’s nothing wrong with the utilitarian approach, most people don’t have time for any more than that, but I do think you miss out. Part of the reason I want people to sign up for some of the same things I do is “The Network Effect” – the more people that use something, the more useful it becomes. An obvious example of this is email. If you’re the only one with an email account, you have nobody to write to and it’s pretty much worthless. But as your friends and family get email accounts too, then you have people to write, and people to receive messages from, and everybody else gets those same benefits. The network effect applies to almost everything on the internet, and many things off of it. Unfortunately, very few of the people in my social network have the time or interest to do anything past email. I’m shocked I got a couple of people to sign up for Twitter and last.Fm. I think I might have just caught them at a good moment in their busy schedules though.

The funny part about it to me, though, is that my friends and I do a lot of the same things that these services are made for. We send out text messages with random thoughts of ours to like 5 people at once all the time (most of which are relatively innocuous) so why not sign up to twitter so we can always see what’s on each other’s minds? We talk about new music and songs we’ve found, so why not sign up for last.fm so each of us can see what the others have been listening to lately? We send out long emails analyzing and complaining about stuff and reading the responses others send, so why not start a blog? I can see how they wouldn’t want to add another account to check, another password to remember, and another website to bookmark, to their daily routine. And not everybody wants everybody else in the world to be able to see something they write/do. But on the other hand, I think we’d get a lot out of it, and a lot more out of each other.

So I don’t know whether the problem is my failure to communicate the value of some things, their failure to see the value, or simply the lack of value in some services I frequent. But, I think my solution is going to be to both start recommending less, and to make a clearer and better case for why people should use some of the same things I do. It should help in a professional sense, because I think I’d like to recommend stuff to people for a living (that’s all a consultant really is, right?), and it’ll help in a personal sense, since maybe going more in-depth with fewer things will actually turn one or two more people to seeing things my way. Plus I can just talk about everything else here. We’ll see how it turns out.

P.S. – Make sure you check out So The Days Go and The Thracian Drive. Good stuff.

A couple of random things that annoy me about people and email:

1. People that use a work/ISP email address for personal stuff

Ok, I understand, not everybody gets a lot of email. Some people, especially older people, have to use email at work and they still do stuff like actually talk on their phones when they’re out of the office. I’m willing to just give those people a pass for the moment and just focus on the younger people – the people around my age – right now.

The people that have been using email for going on 10 years, maybe more.

Last week I got an email from this guy that does party promotions (whom I did NOT give my email address to, but that’s a topic for another post), promoting some party. This guy sent an email out to his list, which is nothing unusual, but the thing that I really didn’t understand was that he sent this email out from his Accenture email account. Now my first instinct when writing about that was to spit some venom, but I asked a friend that works at Accenture and he didn’t seem to think it was a big deal or a violation of whatever email policies Accenture has, so that’s probably the wrong angle to take on it. So I’m going to try and put forth something a little more calm.

Basically, I can’t understand why a person would even want to use their work email address for something like this. I don’t see how it is their best interests for one, simple, reason – what happens when you no longer work there? This is the same principle that comes to mind when seeing people that only use an email address from their ISP (i.e. _____@comcast.net). What happens if you move to another city that has a different provider? All that stuff you were relying on in your email account is mostly gone, and on top of that you have to let people know that you have a new email address and you always wonder about that person that you haven’t talked to in a few years that is gonna try to email you but only has the old address. Maybe the rest of you don’t think about that though, I do.

It is especially confusing to me because it’s not like it’s difficult to get a web-based email address. They’re free, you know. How long has hotmail been around? Between that, yahoo and gmail, you’ve gotta like one of those. Running out of space isn’t even an issue anymore like it used to be, yahoo is unlimited space and the rest are big enough to take you a while to fill them up. If you use a gmail account, you can even download the messages into whatever email program you use on your computer for free and don’t have to deal with the irritating flashing ads the other two have. Why not just get an account with one of those? I honestly want someone that doesn’t use one to help me understand this. Is it just because you’re used to it and don’t see a reason to change something that works? Am I spending too much time thinking about something that just doesn’t matter?

1. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy – use it

I shouldn’t even have to explain this, if you are sending something out to a group of people, your default instinct should be to use the bcc option, because most of them probably don’t want to see all the one-word replies going back to you. Unless you’re trying to foster an email discussion, and you’re sure that everyone you’re sending it to wants to be part of that discussion, don’t subject them to that. The only possible exception to this is if you’re sending something to a huge amount of people because then someone will usually get pissed at all the replies and you can get a nice little email argument going on. Those are good for a laugh on a slow day at work, but only every once in a while.

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It’s still kinda odd to me the way the internet can make you feel like you have some kind of connection with someone you’ve never met, or even had a conversation with.

I follow the twitters (that feels so corny to actually write) of this woman named Veronica Belmont.

I heard of her because she is on this technology podcast that I used to listen to, but even though I stopped listening to the podcast, I kept following her blog. Now a blog is pretty personal, but I feel like following twitters is even more personal, because sending one is almost an impulsive act. It’s whatever is on your mind at that second, whereas a blog is more thought out and considered.

An example: the other day Veronica sent out a twitter out about some random funny thing her brother said. Not worth a full blog post, but great for twitter. It’s like what that person would say to you if you were standing next to them.

Reading what her and other people write and sometimes feeling like I probably know what they’re like makes me wonder if reading all of the publicly accessible information about someone could really give you a pretty good picture of what someone is like. Like I wonder if someone went and googled my name, and then went and looked at the posts here on this blog, comments I’ve put on other people’s Friendster, Myspace and Facebook pages(I know, the post-college social networking trifecta), the comments they’ve put on mine, my twitters, my bookmarks, my musical tastes, my photos (nothing there yet because I’m wary of putting pics of myself and my friends out into the interwebs – that may change once I get more comfortable with the idea) and, soon, my website (don’t even bother clicking yet, got some other projects I have to finish first), and my daily reading (also nothing yet, just discovered that feature), would that person get a good sense of what I’m like as a person?

Of course I doubt even all of that info would show the whole picture. Most people would probably agree that their whole personality couldn’t be captured just by looking at some of the stuff they put online, because there is so much more. Like if you looked at my interests I think you could almost confuse me with some young(-ish) white guy that lives in San Francisco. But even though you wouldn’t get the complete picture, you’d probably still get a heluva lot.

Just a thought.

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Ok so all those long-ass posts I’ve been writing take a while to come out because I need to find something I care enough about to start typing. in order to make sure I’m putting something up much more often (hopefully everyday) I added something to my myspace page (once I figure out how, I’ll put it on the blogspot page too). It’s this service called twitter. Basically you can post whatever is on your mind (in 140 characters or less) and anybody can see it. I did it because there are mad things that I think of during the day that I never write down or end up saying to anyone, and I’m real big on myself, so obviously I think everyone needs to know these things. Just another way for me to get the thoughts out of my head and onto the interwebs. If I write enough each day, I might just post it all as a blog entry that night. Maybe I’ll even think something is interesting enough to eventually turn it into a full-fledged blog entry.

I figure this way, I can send out short stuff on twitter consistently, and then keep working on the medium and lengthy stuff in the meantime. Basically, it’s all about keeping the fingers going with more material. You can go to twitter.com/littlelazer to get the feed too. So, keep checking in from time to time and see the little things that go through my head throughout the day. Hopefully it won’t disappoint.

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